Since I was born in 1960, I have been watching Feminism for a long time. Glennon Doyle’s recent book Untamed is an impressive addition to the Feminist canon. She addresses many issues with chapters that are, in effect, a tightly integrated set of personal essays. In addition to feminism, Glennon writes about her own gay awakening and about racism, but the biggest overarching theme is human liberation—how all of us can gain from “burning memos” we have received from our culture that are inappropriate. Through all of this, Glennon’s skill as a writer helps bring her message home.

Glennon begins Untamed with a true story about a tame cheetah. Her metaphor is that there is something off about a tame cheetah. Just so, there is something off about an overly tame human being. (It is good that over evolutionary time we have domesticated ourselves genetically, but have we gone too far in cultural taming beyond that?)

Untamed is an excellent source for powerful quotations and vivid stories. Let me share some of my favorites. In doing so, I am inevitably selecting those that speak to me, a straight, white man. There are many, many other passages that I suspect might be even more striking to women reading the book than the passages I have selected. I’ll organize things by topic area. A substantial vertical gap indicates a separate passage. My words are the unindented ones.

The Effect of Sexism on Men:

I opened the shower curtain and noticed the twelve empty bottles littering the tub’s edge. All the bottles on the right side were red, white, and blue. All the bottles on the left side were pink and purple. I picked up a red bottle from what was clearly my son’s side. It was tall, rectangular, bulky. It yelled at me in bold red, white, and blue letters:

3X BIGGER, DOESN’T ROB YOU OF YOUR DIGNITY, ARMOR UP IN MAN SCENT, DROP-KICK DIRT, THEN SLAM ODOR WITH A FOLDING CHAIR.

I thought: What the hell? Is my son taking a shower or preparing for war in here?

I picked up one of the girls’ slim, metallic, pink bottles. Instead of barking marching orders at me, that bottle, in cursive, flowy font, whispered disconnected adjectives: alluring, radiant, gentle, pure, illuminating, enticing, touchable, light, creamy. Not a verb to be found. Nothing to do here, just a list of things to be.

Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret. Our men are caged, too. The parts of themselves they must hide to fit into those cages are the slices of their humanity that our culture has labeled “feminine”—traits like mercy, tenderness, softness, quietness, kindness, humility, uncertainty, empathy, connection. We tell them, “Don’t be these things, because these are feminine things to be. Be anything but feminine.” The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits. There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. “Femininity” is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label “feminine.”

I don’t want my son to be tamed into loneliness. So when I get stuck carpooling Chase and his friends all over God’s green Earth, I turn down the radio and say:

What was your most embarrassing moment this week?

What’s your favorite thing about Jeff? Juan? Chase?

Hey, guys: Who do you imagine is the loneliest kid in your class?

How do you feel during those active-shooter drills when you’re hiding in the closet with your friends?

In the rearview mirror, I catch them rolling their eyes at each other. Then they start talking, and I marvel at how interesting their inner thoughts, feelings, and ideas are.

My friend Jason told me that for the entirety of his childhood, he had cried only in the bathroom because his tears would bother his father and mother. “Man up,” they’d say.

He told me that he and his wife, Natasha, were trying to raise their son differently. They want Tyler to be able to express all of his emotions safely, so Jason has been modeling vulnerability by expressing himself more openly in front of his son and his wife. After he told me that he said, “This might be in my head, but I feel like when I try to get vulnerable, Natasha gets uncomfortable. She says she wants me to be sensitive, but the two times I’ve cried in front of her or admitted that I was afraid, I’ve felt her pull back.”

Natasha is my dear friend, so I asked her about that. When I told her what Jason had said, she looked surprised: “I can’t believe he noticed that, but he’s right. When he cries, I feel weird. I am embarrassed to say that what I feel is kind of like disgust. Last month he admitted that he was afraid about money. I told him we would get through it together, but, on the inside, I felt myself thinking: Man up, dude. MAN UP? I’m a feminist, for God’s sake. It’s terrible. It doesn’t make any sense.”

It’s not terrible, and it makes perfect sense. Since women are equally poisoned by our culture’s standards of manhood, we panic when men venture out of their cages. Our panic shames them right back in. So we must decide whether we want our partners, our brothers, our sons to be strong and alone or free and held.

I am proud of even my limited athletic career of little-league football and high school wrestling, with a little cross-country thrown in. But I have to admit that a key motivation for doing that athletics was the fear that as a bookworm I wouldn’t be seen as masculine enough and so would be teased. Moreover, I leaned toward fairly hard-edged intellectual debate because it seemed masculine—one more way to try to avoid being teased for not being masculine enough.

Cell Phones for Kids:

I was once talking to a Silicon Valley executive who had played an integral role in the creation and proliferation of cell phones. I asked how old her kids had been when she’d bought them phones. She laughed and said, “Oh, my kids don’t have phones.” “Ah,” I said. Don’t get your kids high on your own supply. Those who made the phones are creative people, and they want their children to become people who create, not just consume. They don’t want their children searching for themselves out there; they want them discovering themselves in here. They know that phones were designed to keep us addicted to exterior life and that if we never dive inward, we never become who we were meant to be.

The dangers of social media in particular for young minds is one of the themes of The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Based on timing, they tie the rise in depression and anxiety among college freshwoman to having a “Like” button in service during the impressionable middle-school years. (Males were somewhat protected by leaning toward video games more than social media.) The recommendation is to not let children have fully-enabled cell phone until high school at the earliest.

Racism and Antiracism:

I imagined myself to be the kind of white person who would have stood with Dr. King because I respect him now. Close to 90 percent of white Americans approve of Dr. King today. Yet while he was alive and demanding change, only about 30 percent approved of him—the same rate of white Americans who approve of Colin Kaepernick today. So, if I want to know how I’d have felt about Dr. King back then, I can’t ask myself how I feel about him now; instead I have to ask myself: How do I feel about Kaepernick now? If I want to know how I’d have felt about the Freedom Riders back then, I can’t ask myself how I feel about them now; instead, I have to ask myself: How do I feel about Black Lives Matter now? If I want to know how I’d have shown up in the last civil rights era, I have to ask myself: How am I showing up today, in this civil rights era?

So I will commit to showing up with deep humility and doing the best I can. I will keep getting it wrong, which is the closest I can come to getting it right. When I am corrected, I will stay open and keep learning. Not because I want to be the wokest woke who ever woked. But because people’s children are dying of racism, and there is no such thing as other people’s children. Hidden racism is destroying and ending lives.

What I didn’t know back then is that there are several valid and contradictory schools of thought about how white women should show up in the racial justice movement. One view: White women—when accountable to and led by women of color—should use our voices and platforms to call other white women into anti-racism work. Another view: White women should only use their voices to point to people of color already doing the work. Those who subscribed to the latter philosophy were furious with me about this webinar. Why would you try to teach instead of pointing toward women of color who are already doing this work?

Why would you take up space in this movement when so many women of color have been doing this work forever? You offering a free course is taking money out of black educators’ pockets. Offering a “safe space” for white women to talk about race is wrong—white women don’t need to be safe; they need to be educated. You are canceled. You are a racist. You are a racist, Glennon. You are nothing but a racist. Everywhere, the word racist.

I talk to women all the time about how the misogyny pumped into the air by our culture affects us deeply. How it corrupts our ideas about ourselves and pits women against each other. How that programmed poison makes us sick and mean. How we all have to work hard to detox from it so that we don’t keep hurting ourselves and other women. Women cry and nod and say, “Yes, yes, me, too. I’ve got misogyny in me, and I want it out.” No one is terrified to admit she has internalized misogyny, because there is no morality attached to the admission. No one decides that being affected by misogyny makes her a bad person. When a woman says she wants to work to detox herself of misogyny, she is not labeled a misogynist. It is understood that there is a difference between a misogynist and a person affected by misogyny who is actively working to detox. They both have misogyny in them, programmed by the system, but the former is using it to wield power to hurt people and the latter is working to untangle herself from its power so she can stop hurting people

But then when I bring up racism, the same women say, “But I’m not racist. I am not prejudiced. I was raised better than that.”

We are not going to get the racism out of us until we start thinking about racism like we think about misogyny. Until we consider racism as not just a personal moral failing but as the air we’ve been breathing. How many images of black bodies being thrown to the ground have I ingested? How many photographs of jails filled with black bodies have I seen? How many racist jokes have I swallowed? We have been deluged by stories and images meant to convince us that black men are dangerous, black women are dispensable, and black bodies are worth less than white bodies. These messages are in the air and we’ve just been breathing. We must decide that admitting to being poisoned by racism is not a moral failing—but denying we have poison in us certainly is.

In America, there are not two kinds of people, racists and nonracists. There are three kinds of people: those poisoned by racism and actively choosing to spread it; those poisoned by racism and actively trying to detox; and those poisoned by racism who deny its very existence inside them.

In the last week, I have been thinking a lot about racism and antiracism. Some thoughts:

• For at least half a century, a large fraction of the people in our culture have been working on antiracism. Clearly, these efforts have not been entirely effective. It is totally legitimate to question whether doubling down on the antiracism methods in common use is the best way to go.

• Field experiments and associated analysis examining the effects of antiracism interventions is an important way that economists can contribute to antiracism. (As one example, I have heard that standard corporate diversity training has been examined in this way and found wanting.)

• To me, limiting antiracism efforts or even antiracism leadership to only those of particular races or particular ethnicities seems like a mistake. Obviously, those who have not directly experienced racist denigration directed at them should approach this area with great humility and eagerness to hear about the experiences of those who have. But the value of competition in ideas should extend to encouraging even white people who feel so inspired to try to innovate in the difficult area of antiracism.

• I hate the idea of people being told to shut up. This is a visceral thing for me. I think that in particular, people vulnerably sharing their own experiences is quite valuable. The vulnerable sharing of the experiences of those who have been racially denigrated is probably relatively more important for antiracism, but there is likely to be some value in white people vulnerably sharing their own experiences. (On vulnerability, don’t miss these two TED talks by the academician Brene Brown: “The power of vulnerability” and “Listening to shame.”)

• In line with the last two passages from Untamed I have above, I find a “mindfulness” approach to antiracism inspiring. Let’s acknowledge and shine a light on even buried, unconscious racism and institutional racism wherever we find it. But just as those being trained to meditate are told not to make themselves wrong for their “monkey mind” but rather gently bring themselves back to the meditation practice when their mind wanders, let us be gentle with those who try to fight their own racism but have (unsurprisingly) failed to fully eradicate it from their minds and hearts. (We can be much tougher on those who either glory in their own racism or refuse to acknowledge and fight the racism that they carry.)

• “Extremists” tend to be an important ingredient in social change because it is only the existence of extremists who make “moderates” look moderate. But note that this principle only applies to extremists of a type for which a moderate version of that view has some appeal. (Relatedly, see my discussion of “hippie-punching” in “Will Women Ever Get the Mormon Priesthood?”)

Gay Rights Shouldn’t Depend on Whether Being Gay is Genetic

What I want to say is: What if I wasn’t born this way at all? What if I married Abby not just because I’m gay but because I’m smart? What if I did choose my sexuality and my marriage and they are simply the truest, wisest, most beautiful, most faithful, most divine decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life? What if I have come to see same-gender love as a really solid choice—just a brilliant idea? Something I would highly recommend?

And what if I demand freedom not because I was “born this way” and “can’t help it” but because I can do whatever I choose to do with my love and my body from year to year, moment to moment—because I’m a grown woman who does not need any excuse to live however I want to live and love whomever I want to love?

What if I don’t need your permission slip because I’m already free?

I addressed some of this issue in “New Evidence on the Genetics of Homosexuality.” But Glennon has a much more powerful statement of human liberation in this passage:

What if I don’t need your permission slip because I’m already free?

The History of the Anti-Abortion and Anti-Gay Movements

I did my research. Turns out, the memo he was trying to pass me—“A good Christian bases her faith on disapproving of gays and abortion”—started being issued only forty years ago. In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time.

They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.

Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan—who, as governor of California had signed into law one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country—began using the language from the new memo. Evangelicals threw their weight behind him, and voted in a bloc for the first time to elect President Reagan. The Religious Right was born. The face of the movement was the “pro-life and pro-family values” stance of millions, but the blood running through the movement’s veins was the racism and greed of a few.

I find this fascinating. I wish I knew how accurate this historical account is. It sounds like something that might well be contested. But if true, this provides an important perspective.

Being Inspired Instead of Envious

When I see a joyful, confident woman moving through the world with swagger, I’m going to forgive myself for my first reaction because it’s not my fault, it’s just my conditioning.

First reaction: Who the hell does she think she is?

Second reaction: She knows she’s a goddamn cheetah.

The same principle applies to human liberation more generally. Other things that other people have may be harder to get. But if you seem someone who has an attitude you envy, there is a good chance that with some work, tou can get that attitude too.

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• On Human Potential

• 'The Four Agreements' by Don Miguel Ruiz (with Janet Mills) and `The Fifth Agreement' by Don Miguel Ruiz and Don Jose Ruiz (with Janet Mills)

• Bex's Rules for Life

• Recognizing Opportunity: The Case of the Golden Raspberries—Taryn Laakso

• Vicky Biggs Pradhan: How Crises Make Us Rethink Our Lives

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